YAWKEY, MAKE WAY
Some saying racist image not deserved
There aren’t many things that highlight the Red Sox’ complicated history with race relations more than this latest controversy over removing the name Yawkey from the iconic street outside Fenway Park.
Some are happy to see it go, citing the team’s controversial past — the Red Sox were the last team to integrate and the late owner Tom Yawkey, in whose honor the street is named, is alleged to have uttered a racial slur at Jackie Robinson during a tryout at Fenway in 1945. But others say Yawkey was a philanthropic icon who devoted his life and gave his fortune to this city.
Yawkey supporters loudly claim that the late team owner’s racist reputation is not deserved.
The Yawkey Foundation, the charitable organization founded by Yawkey and his wife, Jean, put out a statement yesterday slamming the team’s decision to petition city officials to change Yawkey Way back to Jersey Street.
John Harrington, chairman of the foundation and a former Red Sox president, has been on the forefront of the battle to preserve the Yawkey Way name. Harrington was traveling last night, a foundation spokesman told me, but he directed me to the Rev. Ray Hammond, a longtime foundation trustee and pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Jamaica Plain.
Hammond said changing Yawkey Way is a “terrible decision.”
“This is a classic example of the fact that if something that’s untrue is repeated enough times, the people will believe that it’s true,” Hammond told me last night.
Referring to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager who hired Jackie Robinson in 1945, Hammond said, “No one’s saying that Tom Yawkey was Branch Rickey. He wasn’t. But by God, he definitely was not David Duke, in spite of what people think.”
Hammond, who is black, said he has spoken to fellow trustees who knew Tom and Jean Yawkey personally, as well as others, both black and white, who knew them in Georgetown, S.C., where they had a home, and spoke “very highly and glowingly” of them.
No one disputes that the Red Sox lagged in integration, but Hammond insisted Tom Yawkey never called Jackie Robinson a racial epithet, as has been lore in Boston for years. Hammond said the claim has been debunked “but repeated nonetheless.”
Changing Yawkey Way, Hammond said, would be a “major step backward for Boston — not forward.”
“This is another example where we think somehow some act is going to purge our past. It’s not. That past would have to be fixed by the things we do in the present,” Hammond said. “It would be a terrible decision and yet another example of how we don’t get it right on the issue of race in Boston.”